Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. David Williams; 05.31.2015
Scripture: Genesis 1:1 - 2:3
LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:
It’s that time of year, now as the heat of the summer rises, when I find myself regularly surveying the little patch of creation that I claim as my own. It’s a pleasant moment, that surveying, because in so much else of life, it feels like we’re being driven like pollen before a late-spring storm. We have the demands of our employers and bureaucracies, or the demands of the endless cycle of activities that spring up for our children, and it can get to feeling like we’re just pawns in a strange and convoluted game of multidimensional chess.
Maybe that’s why I love gardening. I look out across my little suburban third of an acre like Mufasa showing Simba his lands, and sure, it’s not anywhere as impressive and there are thankfully fewer hyenas, but it’s that same feeling. Here, the place over which I have dominion. Here, the place where I am King. And I think to myself, “It’s good ta be da King.” Then I stride around, tending to my subjects. You get to know them, bit by bit, know how to tend to them and care for them.
There are the strawberry patches, of course, which are pumping out a couple of pints of fresh sweetness every morning. There are my beans, who are in a new patch now, and struggling this year to overcome the Bermuda grass that just isn’t ready to let go of that little four by eight bit of soil.
There are new additions this year, too. The Early Girl tomatoes, swelling up like fat green balloons, which I’m not quite sure why I’m growing because I really am not at all fond of tomatoes. My wife really likes ‘em, though, so I suppose that’s why.
There are the spaghetti squash, which are kind of freaking me out a little bit. It’s not just that they grow so crazy fast, their huge leaves cast out like sails. It’s that they keep changing. One day, they look normal, just a plant with big leaves. And then suddenly it’s like they’re something out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, an explosion of tentacles and tendrils snaking out everywhere and grabbing on to everything. And the next day, there are these huge weird flowers, like something out of Day of the Triffids. If they grew faces, I wouldn’t be half surprised.
There are other denizens, the voles and chipmunks and squirrels and field mice, who probably aren’t enamored of my traps, no kill though they may be. There are nesting doves and sparrows, and the wren who made her nests in the pots I’d been planning on using to grow garlic this season. She freaks out and flies away whenever I check on her babies, which strikes me as pretty lousy parenting. “Go ahead! Eat my children!”
But in all of that, and in everything I do to make and maintain the little rectangle of the planet social convention says is mine, I’m pleased with it. It’s a good thing, to which I am connected and in which I see the strange and miraculous workings of life.
Which, when contemplating our connection to creation as laid out in the first Genesis story, is an important thing for us to consider as we move in this world.
What we got this morning, in all of its length, was Genesis 1 and the first three verses of Genesis 2. It's a story that comes to us from what objective and critical historical scholarship would describe as the "priestly" or "P" tradition. The rhythms and patterns of the story lend themselves to liturgy and worship, with cycles of repeated words that appear to have been intended to be chanted or recited or sung.
This is the "God made all this stuff in six days, and on the seventh, he kicked back and chilled" story. Like many other defining stories from other world religious traditions, it spins out a story of existence shaped from undifferentiated chaos, what in the ancient Hebrew was called the tohu wabohu, the "unformed and void." Outside of the chronology of the story, and the impossibility of taking it literally (how can you have "days" before there is a "sun?"), it makes several defining statements about the nature of the universe.
The Priestly story clearly affirms that the creation…all that we see and perceive…is good. It is to be viewed not neutrally, or as inscrutable and dangerous, but as somehow essentially positive. That is certainly true of our tiny delicate little living gem of a planet, but it is also the operating presumption about the rest of being. It is good, its goodness repeatedly proclaimed by the One from whom it was given form.
The story also establishes that rest, balance, and reflection are a central part of participation in the goodness of creation. Our created purpose was not endless toil, laboring endlessly in the fields or droning away on that proposal for the new client one our laptop at one-thirty in the morning. Sabbath and a time to delight in and bless the being around us are just an essential part of participation in what our Maker has made.
What is notable, or what industrial and post-industrial-era Christian faith has often fixated upon, is the idea that we human beings have been given “dominion” over all of the living beings of the earth. What we want to hear is that this whole world exists to serve human needs and human hungers, and that it serves no purpose in existence other than to satisfy our every desire. Everything that lives, our whole world, we are permitted to do with as we please.
We can tear the tops off of Appalachia’s green and misty mountains. We can leave the oceans as dead places, filled not with teeming fish but just great deserts, covered with state-sized islands of floating plastic debris. We can fill the skies with poison, and heat the earth with the smothering carbon fumes of our machines. We can pave paradise, and put up a parking lot. It’s our right, right there in the Bible! Dominion! God wants us to build that parking lot!
So what does God want, from us, as we tell ourselves this story of our own power?
In verse 26, we hear the following, if we’re reading Hebrew and English simultaneously: WaYomer Elohim (and said The Gods,) naaseh adam b’tzalmenu (make the creature of earth in the idol of us) kid’mutenu (in the model of us) w’yir’du (and give dominion) vid’gat hayam (over fish the sea) uv’of hashamayim (and birds the skies) u’vab’hemah uvkalhaaretz (and unspeaking quadrupeds on whole the earth) uvkhalharemes ha romes alhaaretz (and to all reptiles glidecrawling on the earth).
Every Hebrew word comes from a three letter root, the Hebrew root word of w’yirdu “to give dominion” is rosh dalet hey, רָדָה, radah. And that word, as it appears in various other places in the scriptures, is peskily polyvalent. That means it means different things, in different places. Dominion can and does often mean oppression, the kind of authority that involves beating down and crushing underfoot. In most places where it’s applied to the rule of human beings in the bible, that’s what it’s used to describe, for reasons that should be gobsmackingly obvious to any student of human history.
But what, in the context of the first Creation story, does this mean? If we are created b’tzalmenu, which means in the image, shadow, or phantom of God, what kind of dominion do we see the Creator of the Universe imposing over the creation?
We see, in each of these days, in each of these moments, evidence that God’s dominion over the earth is not rooted in hunger to possess or hunger to control. Why would the Creator of the Universe desire power? God makes, shapes, and clearly cares for all of creation. We, in our tiny mortal way, have also been given the freedom to choose, and in our choosing, to shape the reality in which we find ourselves. We are Kings and Queens, given the authority to bend creation around us with our intention.
But what sort of King? What sort of Queen? Power and dominion are dangerous things, if we’re not aware of what impact we are having. If ours is the power that does not create, but destroys, the power that does not give, but takes, what sort of world do we shape for ourselves? Are we shaping Eden, or a desert? Are we creating a thing that we can look at with open eyes, and declare that it is good?
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring what that means, and how we as Christians can best live out our calling to be at peace with one another and the whole of creation. Because the way we use what we have been given should matter to us.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
